The film is part of the Z Gallery programme and portrays a territory in transformation after years of abandonment of agricultural activity. The film combines scenes shot on 16 mm film as well as images obtained by digital means.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the premiere of Paraíso, a new film by the directors Maddi Barber and Marina Lameiro, produced as part of Artium Museum’s Z Gallery programme. The film leads us through a territory in transformation that its inhabitants want to recover after decades of abandonment of agricultural activity. Barber and Lameiro combine filmed scenes with images recorded by using digital data capture technologies. In order to mark this exhibition, Artium Museum has published a publication with an essay by María Palacios Cruz, curator, lecturer and researcher on moving images. The film was produced in collaboration with the Mondragon Corporation. The Z Gallery programme is curated by Garbiñe Ortega.

The film begins in darkness with the sound of a woman’s voice describing the images that she sees or has been allowed to see. As María Palacios Cruz explains: “She understands them as referring to ‘death’, but there is no sadness, no heaviness about them. It is all part of the natural order of things; death and life are inseparable. Later, we will learn that the images the woman is describing are the voices of trees in a woodland area that has been marked for deforestation”. After the villages in the Arce Valley were abandoned in the 1960s, the Government of Navarre planted pine trees in the fields that were tilled or used as pasture for animals. More than 50 years later, they have decided to cut down the pine trees in one of these villages to recover the fields, the agricultural practices and the way of life that was on the verge of disappearing with the depopulation of the rural areas in favour of the cities. Its inhabitants have always called this place “Paradise”.

Maddi Barber and Marina Lameiro have made this film by combining analogue 16mm filming, with its specific texture, and digital image capture using a three-dimensional landscape scanner. The exhibition also includes a series of topographic maps and orthophotographs from various periods that show the successive transformation of this territory of the Arce Valley, in addition to a herbarium with samples collected in the area where the film was shot. The project is completed by a series of making-of stills and a sound piece that preserves the memory of the sounds of the forest.

Paraíso is the first collaboration between Maddi Barber and Marina Lameiro. Both Barber and Lameiro have engaged with collective and participatory processes before, but more than an exchange between their respective artistic practices, Paraíso proposes one with (and between) the inhabitants of the forests around Lakabe, both human and non-human; a story told by the trees that are to be felled to make way for pastureland.